


Castling

by Sandrine Shaw (Sandrine)



Category: Chess (musical)
Genre: Post-Canon, Yuletide 2009
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-18
Updated: 2009-12-18
Packaged: 2017-10-04 13:02:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sandrine/pseuds/Sandrine%20Shaw
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Florence, after Bangkok, trying to build something from the ashes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Castling

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fourzoas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fourzoas/gifts).



After Bangkok, she returns to an empty apartment that still smells and looks and sounds like Anatoly, little traces of him left everywhere. His favourite wine in the cupboard, his shirts in the wardrobe, the scent of his aftershave clinging to the pillow.

_This is it. Checkmate_, she thinks, and for the next four days, she's holing herself up in the apartment and allows herself to mourn everything she's lost: the man she loved (men, really, plural – somewhere deep inside of her, there's still a Freddie-shaped hole, no matter how skilled she's become at ignoring it), her faith in this country, her enjoyment of the game, her father. Of course, she lost her father a long, long time ago, but it still feels like a fresh loss now, for something to be almost within reach and then have it torn away again like the rug from under her feet.

She does what one is supposed to do when mourning. She cries a lot. She gets angry. She asks herself what she's ever done to deserve this, if it all could have been avoided if she'd been smarter, stronger, more cunning. She drinks too much wine and eats too much chocolate. She listens to sad music and watches old romance movies that depress her even more.

Then she takes a deep breath and tells herself, _Enough!_

She throws out the shirts and the wine and the pillows. The chessboards follow suit, and the books, the records of games, the trophies. She calls Walter and says, "I quit," before hanging up and deleting every subsequent message he leaves.

She tries to remember who she used to be – who she was before Anatoly, before Freddie, even – and she does her best to become that person again. Except older, a lot richer in experience, and maybe, just maybe, a little wiser. A little more jaded and broken and guarded as well, but there's nothing to be done about that.

She returns to university, finishes the doctorate she abandoned, accepts a teaching position.

Literature is so much safer than chess. The politics, the intrigue, the betrayal and the heartbreak are all fictional there, and the second-hand experience of all the pain that comes with it is dull and passes quickly without leaving scars. There may not be quite as much satisfaction, as much thrill in unravelling a poem than there is when you make a move that puts your opponent into a corner, but she reminds herself that the rush of winning doesn't make up for the deep plunge you take when you lose.

She meets a nice guy, Thomas, who works as a pharmacist and reads Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his free time, and who has never played a game of chess in his life. Caution is a third guest at their dinner dates for a long time. It's not that Florence doesn't trust Thomas. She just doesn't trust people anymore, nor does she trust herself.

This time, she makes sure she knows exactly what she's in for before she allows herself to fall. And even when she does, when she finally lets him into her life and her heart, she does it carefully, measured, never losing her head. Promises herself she will never be that woman again, someone who'll let her passions and her desires blind her to reason.

And so, she isn't.

Somewhere in Germany, a wall falls and people are celebrating a new freedom. The Soviet Union collapses, and the Cold War ends with a whimper instead of the bang everyone had been afraid of.

Meanwhile, life in New Hampshire goes on, unchanged. The students come and go, the classics stay the same, and so does Florence.

She runs into Freddie in New York, on a rainy Wednesday morning in the spring of 1998. A chance meeting in the lobby of a hotel that should be too large and too anonymous for chance meetings. And yet, there they are.

She turns around at the reception and all but stumbles over a suitcase, and when she's about to berate its owner for hazardously putting it in the way, her gaze comes to rest on a familiar face. He looks good – older and a bit heavier, but tan and healthy in his Armani suit and with his expensive haircut which, she assumes, is doing a good job of covering a receding hair line.

For a moment, he seems taken aback, as startled and wrong-footed by the encounter as she feels, but his trademark smirk returns soon enough.

"Florence. Fancy meeting you here."

She inclines her head in greeting. "Freddie." The cool, unaffected little smile she musters is one she's had years to practice, and she knows that by now it looks perfectly real. And yet, she wonders whether he cannot see right through her, through the glacial, polished façade, right down to the place where she's still broken in ways she knows will never mend.

"It's been a while," he says, and while she's still contemplating whether 'not long enough' is too clichéd an answer, he's already pressing on, "My plane leaves in two hours, but I have time for a quick coffee. How about we catch up a little?"

She finds herself agreeing, simply because there is no good way of declining the offer without appearing like a bitter woman with a grudge, and also because she _is_ a little curious. For so long, she has tried so hard to leave the past behind that she was afraid of even checking what had become of the people she used to know.

They sit down at a small table in the hotel bar, facing each other like two chess players before the opening gambit.

He asks how she is. Great, she tells him. And he? He's fine, he says, which doesn't surprise her at all. Freddie is one of those people who will always be fine, no matter what happens, win or lose, whether people desert him or countries fall – and if he isn't fine, well, then he'll at least pretend.

She tells him about the conference she's here for, about Tom, about how much she enjoys teaching. She concedes that she doesn't like the college politics and all the bureaucracy, but it's a small price to pay. He listens, more attentively than she remembers him ever listening to anything she had to say before, and when he asks her whether she ever misses chess, he doesn't seem to be calculating or taunting her.

"Not really," she replies, without thinking about it. It's the first lie she told that day, an obvious one as well, and she knows that he knows. It would be so easy for him to call her on it. But he doesn't, and for the first time since she laid eyes on him, she begins to relax a little.

He's still covering the chess tournaments for the news, he tells her, though he also does other stuff now. Playing at being a journalist, he calls it with a wry smile, whatever. She knows him well enough that despite his nonchalant attitude, he's probably taking the job more seriously and treating it more competitively than most professionals, because that's the only way he knows.

"Do you regret giving it up?" She throws his earlier question back at him. "Playing chess?"

His smile is sharp enough to cut steel, but somewhere underneath, there's a hint of mischievousness that takes away some of its edge. "Who says I ever gave it up?"

They sip their coffee – his milky brown with two sugars, hers black and strong and bitter – in companionable silence. He's furiously typing away on his phone while her mind returns to the past, and for the first time in a long while, she doesn't shy away from the memories. It's such a long time now, it feels a little like leafing through a book: the tale is still the same, the heartbreak is still there, but now, finally, it truly does feel like a stranger's story, something that happened to someone else in a time long passed. A Shakespearean tragedy where you disconnectedly applaud the craft with which the writer makes it all fall apart and brings everyone to their knees at the end.

There's a little small talk, then Freddie pays the bill and gets his suitcase. They say goodbye in the lobby, while his cab is waiting outside. He kisses her cheek. She gives him a brief hug.

His cell phone beeps and when he takes it out and checks the message, a smirk passes over Freddie's face, like someone made a private joke. As she watches him, she feels oddly left out for a moment, wondering if she should just leave. They already said their goodbyes, after all. But then he looks up at her and his smile turns a little rueful.

"Anatoly says hello," he tells her softly, and she doesn't know why it even surprises her, why it feels like such a punch to her stomach. It's just like Freddie to make his finest move at the very end of the game, when you're not expecting it anymore.

It takes her a moment too long to recover.

"Listen, I really gotta run," he says before she's found her tongue again, fishing his card from the inside pocket of his jacket and pushing it into her hand. His fingers are warm against hers, and the calluses are strangely familiar in their roughness. "I did enjoy catching up. Call me, yeah?"

He sounds sincere enough, but she's in no state to pay attention, nodding numbly as he disappears out of the door and out of her life.

Florence stares after him after he's long gone, watching the rain pool on the pavement outside and wondering if she's stopped playing for so long that she's forgotten all the clever moves.

The anger that he can just step into her life and make her feel like that, even after all those years, is sharp and almost overwhelming. She holds on to her defences, but only just. The card gets viciously crumpled in her fist, but the irony – the bitter, beautiful irony – is that the woman she is now, the woman she's tried so hard to become, is unable to throw it away because she would never impulsively shut a door behind her out of a fleeting moment of anger. So different to the Florence of back then, who'd have held on to it for sentimental reasons, but still the result is the same.

It seems like her only options are stepping backwards or continuing to tread on the spot, and she can't stop wondering how that happened and when.

Absent-mindedly, she pockets the crumpled card.


End file.
